Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

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      Three

       The Long and the Short and the Tall

      On 3 September 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war with Germany. The Royal Air Force had already flown a small advance party to France. The next day, further advance parties set sail from Portsmouth. Within a week, the men of four divisions were arriving at French ports – just as their fathers and uncles had done a little over a quarter of a century earlier.

      But promptness does not indicate readiness. Major General Bernard Montgomery, commander of 3rd Division, writes that the British Army ‘was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe’. Britain was justifiably renowned for her Royal Navy; she had contributed fully to the development of aerial warfare. But the army that crossed to France in September 1939 was both undermanned and underequipped.

      As recently as April 1938, the government had determined that Britain’s response to a European war would be chiefly naval and aerial. Her land forces would not be sent to Europe; they would defend Britain and her still widely spread Empire. But by the start of war, a desperate reappraisal and a frantic burst of rearmament and troop training had taken place. Conscription had been introduced. There was a massive amount of catching up to be done.

      In fact, the nation’s soldiers were to be engaging in modern warfare against armoured divisions, yet most of their anti-tank rifles would prove useless, knocking out more British shoulders than German tanks. And though the British army had been the first to use tanks, on the Somme in 1916, 1st Armoured Division would not be ready to cross the Channel for many months. Through the period to the Dunkirk evacuation, the British had very few effective tanks. Only the Matilda Mark II – with its 2-pounder cannon, impressive speed and thick armour – was a match for the best French and German tanks. Montgomery, a divisional commander, wrote that he did not see a single British tank throughout the winter. Put simply, when the British Expeditionary Force sailed to France, it was not ready to go to war.

      Despite this, in November 1939, Lord Gort, commander-in-chief of the BEF, told journalist James Lansdale Hodson, ‘I have never had the smallest qualm about the outcome of this war.’ Gort was a buoyant man and he was doing his best to buoy the country. But beyond the state of his army, he had another major problem. As head of the Expeditionary Force, he was answerable to the local French commander, General Georges, who was in turn under the command of French supreme commander General Gamelin. On the face of it, this was acceptable given the relative size of the forces, but in practice it meant that the BEF could be treated in a subordinate fashion. The latest plans and reports could be withheld, advice and opinions could be ignored. Gort had a responsibility to keep a close watch on his ally.

      The British Expeditionary Force, as we have seen, was chiefly made up of young men whose attitudes were formed during the depression, who were influenced by the growing youth culture, and who joined up for reasons ranging from a search for excitement to an escape from unemployment. But the BEF was a broad church. Cyril Roberts, a lance sergeant in the Queen’s Royal Regiment, was the son of a black Trinidadian father and a white mother from Lancashire, disowned by her family for marrying a black man. At a time when roughly 0.0003 per cent of the British population was black or mixed race, Cyril was unusual not only in the BEF, but in British society as a whole.

      Growing up in south London, Cyril and his brother, Victor, learned to stand up for themselves. ‘If you were the only black kid in the class,’ says Cyril’s daughter, Lorraine, ‘you just had to get on with it.’ But the boys had a role model. Their father, George, had served with the Middlesex Regiment in the First World War, becoming known as ‘The Coconut Bomber’ for his grenade-tossing ability, a skill he inadvertently picked up (so the story went) while knocking coconuts out of trees in Trinidad.

      An apprentice telephone engineer before the war, Cyril followed his father into the army, joining up under age, and finding himself promoted above older, more experienced men. ‘He was very calm and organised,’ says Lorraine. ‘He had an air about him. He could take command and people did as they were told.’

      Cyril’s battalion sailed from Southampton, reaching Le Havre early the next morning. These young men, like so many others, were travelling abroad for the first time. What should they expect? What would France look like? Would it be different?

      Second Lieutenant Peter Hadley, of the Royal Sussex Regiment, noted an atmosphere of undisguised excitement among his men as they crossed the Channel. They were like children on a Sunday school outing. But after only a short time in France, Hadley began reading letters from his charges to their parents and girlfriends, expressing disappointment that the people and the houses seemed very much the same as those in England.

      Cyril Roberts’ battalion had a similar experience. At first, the soldiers crowded the train windows as they sped through northern France. But they were very soon bored, and drifting away to play cards. Arriving at their destination at Abancourt in the Pas de Calais, the men were set to work building railway lines. It was hard, physical labour, carried out with pick and shovel, without any mechanical assistance. And this, as far as they were concerned, would be the extent of their role. They were not trained for fighting.

      Shortly before its outbreak, most people in Britain were strongly in favour of war. And once it had begun, the majority believed that Hitler’s bluff had now been called. We have heard what Lord Gort told a journalist in November 1939. Victory was certain, and everybody from the commander-in-chief to the man on the Clapham omnibus thought so. Of course, many of these people had also believed that the last war would be over by Christmas.

      But war was also welcomed for personal reasons. Fred Carter had been an unemployed concreter before joining the Royal Engineers. He viewed the war as an opportunity to return to his old trade – or something very similar. John Williams of the Durham Light Infantry felt actively sorry for the ‘poor sods’ not in the army, condemned to their ordinary little jobs while he and his mates got the glory and the girls.

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